Falling
by Anna Yukihira
Summary: As he grows up, Gilderoy Lockhart decides that falling is better than being invisible.


AN: Yeah, I _know_ Lockhart's a jerk, but there has to be a reason he's a jerk, right? Heck, even _Riddle_ got an excuse, so Lockhart has to have one.

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He's nothing special.

He's a plain kid with muddy-colored hair and a face still round with baby fat. He isn't smart or strong or anything except for ordinary. That's what everyone says.

The other kids tease him at school, says his hair is girly, call him Piggy, tell him he's such a momma's boy. This happens maybe once a week or whenever anyone needs lunch money (which is often). "Forgot your lunch?" they say in the playground. "Get the money off Gilly. It's not like he needs it, after all!" And they laugh and they laugh until his dreams are filled with blackness and sound of their mockery.

He can't count how many times he's come home with his stomach rumbling only to have his mother scream at him for being a glutton when he asks for food. "You've had enough!" she yells at him. "You already eat enough to feed this entire village!"

_But I haven't_, he wants to say. _Can't you hear my stomach growling?_

The words never make it out of his mouth.

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They say he's a momma's boy, and the reason it stings so much is because it isn't true. His mother isn't a kind or loving parent. Quite the opposite. She's harsh and cruel and unforgiving to the point where he wonders what his father ever saw in her. But considering his father, he probably got exactly what he deserved.

He's dumb, his mother screams when he brings home another failed test. He's worthless, he's stupid, and he should just get out of her way.

She never touches him, but her words hit harder than any fists.

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He sits huddled in a corner of the kitchen as his mother and father argue. It's late at night and the room is drenched in shadows. Tensions are high; his mother is waving her arms around already. Their voices are getting louder.

This is the fifth time in the past week.

He wants to go to sleep, really he does, but the sounds of the war can't be drowned out by the thin walls of the house. And besides, he's being punished. Sometime near the start of the argument, one of his parents ordered him to sit in the corner until they set him free. By now, they've forgotten his presence, but they'll notice if he tries to creep out the room.

All he can do is wait out the storm.

Sometime around three in the morning, he gets up and approaches them timidly. He's so tired he feels like he'll fall asleep on his feet, and maybe that's what gives him the foolish courage it takes to ask them to stop fighting.

"Shut up!" his father roars, and deals him a blow that sends him sprawling on the floor. "This is none of your business! Stay out of it!" Under his breath, he adds, "Nosy brat."

He touches his swelling cheek, marked with his father's anger, and repeats inside his head, _Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry._

The next day his teachers ask him if he's alright and where did the bruise on his face come from? He pastes on a fake smile and says, "It was just an accident. I fell down the stairs."

And they believe him.

_Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry._

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Sometimes he dreams. He dreams that one day, he'll be handsome and famous and strong, and no one will dare hit him for fear of what he'll do to them. People will watch him as he walks down the street and it'll be everyone else who clutches at his coattails. Nobody will ignore him.

He dismisses them when he wakes up. Those are impossible dreams, high up on Mt. Olympus with the gods where he can't reach them. He'll always be the forgotten kid in the corner, shying away from people's harsh words and cringing at the sound of a fight. Nothing is going to change.

Later he'll find out that he was right and wrong at the same time.

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He's eleven when a giant stranger with a wild beard approaches him in the street and asks if he's Gillis Lombard. All caution flees his mind and he's too terrified to do anything but nod. No one ever searches for him for reasons that are good.

Instead of hitting him or admonishing him, the stranger introduces himself as a wizard named Rubeus Hagrid and says that he's a wizard too and eligible to attend a school called Hogwarts. He doesn't know what to say, but his mother snaps that they refuse to pay school fees for this ridiculous institution. His heart sinks for a moment, and he realizes that he actually wants to go. Then the giant says it'll be fine and it's all taken care of, and he cries out, "Yes!" so quickly that he accidentally bites his tongue. He tastes the sharp, metallic blood, and winces at the pain, but it's worth it. It'll be worth it.

So he thinks.

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_They lie_, he thinks in the middle of his third year at Hogwarts. This isn't any better than the way things were at home. He's still teased and picked on by the other students when they see him. They make fun of him for his looks and his name, because they all have normal ones or exotic ones like Jack or Imelda, not something plain but weird like Gillis. But most of the time, he's ignored. He says something and no one hears him, not even the teachers. Sometimes people look at him and he feels as see-through as the ghosts.

_Look at me, _he screams inside his head. _Look at me!_

But nobody does.

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Things start to change during his fourth year. He grows four inches and loses the chubbiness that has been with him throughout childhood. And in some ways he's thrilled, because now people can't tease him about his face anymore, but he doesn't feel quite right without the layer of fat that almost feels like a protective shield.

Still, there's nothing he can do about it, and on impulse he dyes his hair during Christmas break. The color he chooses is a shade of gold that glints in the sunlight, and maybe the gold is why people begin to notice him. They _see_ him. Soon his classmates are talking to him and he begins doing better in school. He even manages to join the Quidditch team as a Beater.

The scared boy of his childhood is no longer there when he looks in the mirror. Except for his eyes. His eyes haven't changed at all.

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He graduates from Hogwarts and the first thing he thinks is, _I'm never going back to the village_. By now he's so different that he doubts his parents would recognize him, though that might be because they never paid much attention to him in the first place.

The day he turns seventeen, he changes his name, thinking Gilderoy Lockhart is more suited for a wizard than Gillis Lombard.

He hopes that no one will find the plain, chubby kid that he buries deep in layers of Muggle paperwork.

He doesn't really know what to do, so he wanders around the world, taking odd jobs for cash. But it's lonely like this and he misses the admiring glances that he used to get at Hogwarts.

He doesn't know when the lying starts, but before he knows it, he's telling fellow Hogwarts alumnae that he used to be a Seeker rather than a Beater, because the Seeker is the one who gets all the glory, right? And the admiration returns with that little white lie, so it continues, and soon enough he's entangled in a web of falsehoods he's told

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While he's in Romania, he meets a man in a bar who shyly admits to having defeated a vampire. Intrigued, he encourages his fellow wizard to tell him the tale, and the man explains how he managed to track down the location of the vampire's coffin and staked him in the heart earlier that day.

The man's just about to finish the story, but suddenly a bar fight starts up and the man is hit by some hex that completely scrambles his memory and brains. The man can no longer remember his own name, much less the story he was telling. The man can't even string together a sentence.

He doesn't really know what to do, but he ends up bringing the man to the local police. They can take care of this man much better than he can, he figures.

The next day, there are celebrations going on because the vampire has stopped terrorizing the people of the village. He blurts out, "That's because the vampire is dead!" before he can stop himself, and the next thing he knows, he's surrounded by people who are thanking him.

"I'm not the one who killed it," are the words on the tip of his tongue, but the feeling of their gratitude is like the admiration and it's addicting. He can't bring himself to tell them that they're thanking the wrong man. Besides, it's not the real one knows what he's missing out on. and since the hex has turned him into a babbling fool, the villagers would be disappointed if they met the real hero. So really, he's doing them a favor, right?

Right?

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He goes to Cornwall because he hears there's a banshee there and he remembers how to defeat them from DADA classes. He hopes that if he succeeds, the gratitude will come again, but this time for all the right reasons.

He finds out that he's too late when he gets there and sees a witch defeating the banshee. He tries to be a good sport about it though, and goes to congratulate her, but she screams when she sees him and tries to run away. It turns out she's been ridiculed and harassed for having a hairy chin to the point where she's afraid of other humans, and his heart goes out to her because of their similar pasts.

Harsh rain begins to fall upon them, and as they're searching for shelter, a clap of thunder sounds. The witch shrieks and faints. He has to carry her to shelter in a nearby cave.

When she wakes up, they realize that the battle with the banshee has been engraved so deeply into her mind that she's become terrified of loud noises. The witch breaks down—how is she supposed to avoid loud noises?

Out of sympathy, he suggests that they try to erase the memory of the fight. If she doesn't remember the trauma, how can she be affected by it? She agrees to give it a shot and he Obliviates her, hoping for the best.

It works. But that leaves him as the only one who knows what happened to the banshee, so as he begins explaining to the local magical community, they assume yet again that he's the one who defeated her.

As the happy crowd surrounds him, he asks himself how things always manage to turn out this way.

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Fifteen years later, he's a successful author of thirteen books and has an adoring fan base (composed mainly of teenage girls). It happened mainly by accident. He only ended up publishing the first two stories because he needed money, and he assuaged his guilt by reminding himself that the wizard who killed the vampire and the witch who defeated the banshee were both really shy. They wouldn't want the spotlight, so by keeping it on him, he was actually doing them a favor, right?

But somewhere along the way, he stops asking the true heroes whether they want to forget the horrible (he thinks) memories and starts Obliviating them automatically. And somewhere along the way, he starts to expect that when he begins explaining how the creature was defeated, everyone will assume he was the one who did it.

After a while, he doesn't even try searching for monsters to genuinely defeat. Instead, he focuses his attention on his books and his fans and the editor screeching threats into his ears to send her a new manuscript or else. And gradually, the guilt begins to fade away.

Sometimes though, as he lies awake at night, he wonders when he became such a useless bastard.


End file.
